Philip Giraldi’s Juxtaposition of a Handful of News Stories — Tells Us the Reasons — for the United States’ Carefree Slide into History’s Landfill

30 September 2015

Is contempt our just due?

Former CIA and military intelligence officer Philip Giraldi said that:

I noted a number of stories during the past several weeks that should have raised all kinds of red flags . . . but they frequently received such limited media coverage and were gone so quickly that there was hardly any reaction to them, which is precisely what the government relies on.

He goes on to address the following four — quickly obscured — news stories about:

(1) Russia’s escalation of its pro-Assad role in Syria

(2) the revolt by some intelligence analysts against being ordered to favorably distort their accurately pessimistic reports about US progress against ISIS

(3) a definition-broadening change in the Department of Defense Law of War Manual’s term for killable bad guys — from “unlawful enemy combatant” to “unprivileged belligerent”

and

(4) a West Point law professor’s published perspective that numerous fellow law professors are treasonous and Islamism should (essentially) be exterminated:

In his paper, Bradford argued that a “clique of about forty” legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism — from his footnotes, their ranks appear to include professors at top schools like Harvard, Princeton and NYU — comprise a “super-weapon that supports Islamist military operations” aimed at “American political will” to fight.

Using the acronym CLOACA, which ostensibly stands for “critical law of armed conflict academy” but is also the name for an animal’s anus, Bradford’s article painted these supposedly “treasonous” scholars as “a Western Fifth Column” of Islamist terrorism that should be treated as such.

He even went as far as to suggest that the law schools where they work or the journalists they speak to could also be targeted.

Note

The exceptionally long-winded — dare I say blathering, even by law journal standards — paper is here.

Pertinent pages — regarding (a) prosecuting war-dissenting academics for “treason” and (b) waging “total war” against “Islamism” — are (among many others): 302, 359-360, 435, and 448-450.

Giraldi’s cynically accurate view of the Syrian situation

He says that:

The solution to the . . . ISIS threat is . . . quite simple and consists of working with . . . the people in the region who are most affected . . . which means Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.

A modicum of United States leadership might well have enabled the participants to put aside political differences and create a broad coalition . . . .

But the opportunity was wasted while the White House played with various unworkable scenarios that required getting rid of al-Assad while propping up Baghdad, coddling Erdogan in Turkey and keeping Iran out of it, which narrowed the actual options to zero.

In the final analysis, the Administration has decided to go with the “war without end” route so the eventual Democratic candidate will not look “weak on security” in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

In sum

This:

The Obama White House enabled a war to bring about regime change in Syria, thereby unleashing a monster named ISIS and is now failing utterly in either of it stated objectives to replace the al-Assad government or defeat the terrorists.

It now needs Russian help desperately to extricate itself but it may turn out to be too hubristic to do what needs to be done.

Meanwhile, the government is resorting to cooking intelligence and is prepared to shoot journalists to make its failures go away [—] while a professor at the prestigious United States Military Academy publicly advocates genocide and is given a senior level teaching position off a fake resume.

Washington continues to be simultaneously mired in Afghanistan, which will be another disaster whether we eventually pull out next year, the following year or even in 2020.

We have only ourselves to blame for winding up in the God-awful situation that prevails . . . as we have voted miscreants into office time and again in spite of the inanities they spout and the clear signs that the only thing most of them care about is power and money.

[L]ying and dissimulation have become givens whenever a government spokesman or congressman opens his or her mouth . . . .

The moral? — If we want examples of moral baseness, astounding hypocrisy, and almost intentionally indulged damage to the United States’ core national interests . . .

. . . we need look no further than American leadership and media.

Consider the following contrasting characterization of 1945’s United States — taken from a biography about Japanese-born Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, who was living in Japan during and after World War II:

[Suzuki] had always said it wasn’t only foreigners who could be devils; those among us who need to call them that may be the devils, the enemy.

He encouraged people not to worry about the Americans. “They are people just like us, and they will understand us.”

So the early days of the occupation passed, and the nation was grateful to the victors for their magnanimity. People weren’t being rounded up and shot, they had their emperor and their own government, there were shiploads of food, and, in general, the militarists had been exposed for their great lies and barbarism.

Indeed, the whole world had been turned upside down: everything was the opposite of what they’d been taught for decades.

When you look at human life carefully, you will find out how important it is to become a trustworthy person [Suzuki said].

A strange turn:

Where Nippon once physically tried to dominate everything conceivably related to its self-interest, now the United States does.

Where Imperial Japan was once comprised of maniacal militarists, now the United States is.

Where the Greater Japanese Empire once indoctrinated people with devil-assigning lies, now the United States does.

The American difference is stark and in the wrong direction.

Power seems to encourage wrong-doing on as massive a scale as one can get away with. Ergo, Martin Luther King Jr’s determined grasp of Christian beliefs as guides to just and humane governance.

The once prominent American Christian preacher and the humble Japanese Zen master both tell us something about ourselves.

Too bad that so few of us listen and implement with energy.

PeteFree.com

Philip Giraldi’s Juxtaposition of a Handful of News Stories — Tells Us the Reasons — for the United States’ Carefree Slide into History’s Landfill